Wading Through the Thickets

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Any would-be intellectual site should express its fundamental motives, its reading history, its particular cultural enthusiasm of the moment, as well as it current station in life, its mise-en-scene, its publishing history CV, awards, currents of dreams-hopes-desires, its self-described and corporate health-described mental health standing, its view on current trending hipster anti-social media, its past and future financial debts, its level of felonies committed daily and within the past ten years, its across-the-board sexual desirability, and transhumanist aspirations.

FSN says yes. First it must retrace its long journey into the day’s good night by entering into a nolo contedere plea agreement with Das Racist-in-Chief’s new government to stipulate that none of these icons of philosophic nihilism have ever been “read” by any of the purveyors of FSN. No Schopenhauer, No Nietzsche, no Stirner. Not a word in the original or translation.

Donald Crosby did the work for us, however, and his The Specter of the Absurd: Modern Nihilism will provide much of the background to the deep, scholarly exegesis of this radical resurrection of nihilism now sweeping the lands both foreign and domestic. Like going back in time to an actual education, a reading of Crosby reveals him to be a fine, exacting, accessible prof, of which there can have been zero exemplars in real life. There’s some dangerous territory to be crossed int he last half of the book, something to do with the “sacred” nature of Nature that evidently must have been in Crosby’s parole accord to allow him to continue teaching at Colorado State, but there’s plenty of nihilist meat in the first sections – there will never be a need to revisit these long-dead, epoch-dependent boring icons of nihilism thanks to his great distillations.